


Never Finish a War (Without Starting Another)

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Chapter and Verse [5]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Depression, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Inspired by Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Richard Siken got involved and it all went to hell, Season/Series 09, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 17:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16269257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Against every instinct in his body, Daryl is living at the Sanctuary. Every day is sucking more and more of the life out of him, and he’s beginning to wonder how much more of him there is to take.





	Never Finish a War (Without Starting Another)

**Author's Note:**

> This happened for two reasons: A) I’m pissed off at the season so far, and B) I came across [this beautiful bit of prose](http://dynamicsymmetry.tumblr.com/post/178901778316/aintashes-he-is-stained-by-loss) and I felt like there was a story about this part of Daryl’s life that was screaming at me to tell it. So I did and here it is. 
> 
> This is tagged very very cautiously as a bethyl story but really it doesn’t have to be. If you want to read it that way, it works. If you don’t want to, it works that way as well. He cared a lot about her, that’s pretty much all that matters. 
> 
> The poem I’m using here is “The Worm King’s Lullaby” by Richard Siken. The title comes from “Birds Hover Over the Trampled Field” by the same author. 
> 
> If for some bizarre reason you like this Daryl and would like to see more of him, I feel like he has a lot in common with the Daryl in [Everything Where it Belongs,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5398022/chapters/12469793) though this Daryl is still orders of magnitude less fucked up. 
> 
> Soundtrack is [”Remnants/Shadow Scheme”](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nmaYoU59_bs) by Marconi Union.
> 
> ❤️

**1**

The holes in this story are not lamps, they are not  
wheels. I walked and walked, grew a beard so I could  
drag it in the dirt, into a forest that wasn't there. I want  
to give you more but not everything. You don't need  
everything.

~

Places aren't haunted. He knows that now. He's known it for a long time but every day, every hour, every second is teaching him on levels he never believed possible. Places aren't haunted: people are haunted, and he carries each ghost with him, clinging to his back, whispering in his ears.

He can never quite make out what they're saying. It drives him almost insane. But half the time he hears them better than the living people who talk to him. 

There are moments when he wonders if he's _going_ insane, if he's there already and has been for a while. The conviction that he might be started when the insomnia truly got bad, a week after he arrived; he was given a bed but even when he could sleep he didn't sleep in it. He curled up on the cold floor with a pillow and a blanket and then after a couple of nights he didn't even have those. It was like he was trying to beat it into himself every time he moved and every morning he got up aching—how he's _here_ and not _there,_ how he's here and not anywhere else, how even _here_ doesn't feel real. He doesn't feel real. He feels as much like a ghost as the ghosts inside him, as if maybe they're dragging him across that threshold to join them, which would be preferable in so many ways because at least them he would be _with_ them, only he knows he's not that lucky and the world is not that merciful. 

Now he doesn't sleep. He walks. He walks forever. Up and down the flatly echoing hallways, through rooms like caverns. There's no ground. There's no sky. Everything around him is hard and mechanical. Everything around him squeals and rusts. Everything is dead and dying and nothing will die.

He tries so hard not to be angry at Rick and he's angrier at Rick all the time, and he curses himself for an asshole and curses Rick even more. Still willing to do this for him. Still willing to drag himself through this, for _him_. Hardly ever gets to see him anymore and there are times when he would give anything for that. 

The memory of Rick’s arms, strong and sure and wrapped around him. Not even ghosts now. He's as cold as the floor. He can't get warm. 

~

**2**

This is what they found on the dead man's desk when  
the landlord let them in: twenty-eight pages, esoteric  
and unfollowable, written with perfect penmanship  
and a total disregard for any reader, as if the intended  
audience was a population not quite human. _Angelic_  
_script,_ says the detective, lifting the pages, feeling their  
heft, and he wonders what he means because it isn't.  
His partner nods but ignores him.

A park bench, white roses, dark coats and white roses,  
snow and repetitions of snow—it's hard to read but  
pretty much how they found him: dead on a bench in  
a black coat, the snow falling down.

Twigs and blackbirds, snow and red horses, the ghosts  
floating up, the snow falling down—the detective is  
weeping—and the black coat.

~

Winter came and the cold was all-pervading. People huddled over fires and grumbled; clearly it wasn't the first winter they'd been through but to hear them talk it might have been the worst one yet. He had no idea if that was true and he didn't care to inquire. He didn't care.

Looked at shivering children in the arms of their mothers and fathers and war orphan siblings and it terrified him how utterly he didn't care.

What terrified him even more was how he couldn't stop thinking about killing them all. Sitting in his little room, crosslegged on the floor and fingering his knife, and making plans to do it. Wondering: How many could he get before someone took him down? How many throats could he slit? It wasn't that he hated them; hating them would have been preferable, because then he would have felt something. But there was a hellish numbness in the way he contemplated murder. Not like when he beat the man to death outside; he’s no longer certain where that even happened and someone or the rain washed away the stain. Ferocious, incendiary hatred made him do that, but hate like that burns itself out fast and it's long since gone.

Thinking about murder, though, that much wasn't new; he's been thinking on and off about murder for well over a year now, since the war began and before. He's been considering how murder is by far the easiest thing for him to do. He's been meditating on how he seems to be _made_ for it, how he gets little pleasure out of it but the act doesn't eat away at him like it should. 

Like it would eat away at a good man. 

Is he a bad man? Good men don't think like this. Good men don't regard the slaughter of innocent people as nothing much in the great universal balance, which after all is weighted down on both trays of its hanging scale by mountains of corpses.

Perhaps this would be more like culling. The Sanctuary already sucks in resources from all three other communities and is producing little except for the fuel Eugene’s guided them to make. They can't feed themselves. Their forage will be scarce. You do such things with deer. It's reasonable. 

Brutal, but reasonable. 

That moment toward the end of the war, after a fashion he told Rick he was sorry about what he pushed for with the Sanctuary and the walkers, the icy _realpolitik_ calculus of it, but the truth is that he was and is nothing of the kind. They should have done it. It would have been smarter. It would have been better in the long run. Not merely because it would have ended it all so much faster but because it's what these people fucking deserve. This place should be in ruins. Instead he's been dispatched to try to keep it running, and like a good soldier here he is. 

Only in passing does it occur to him to _cull_ himself, although probably that should be his first pick of his options. God knows where his need to stay alive comes from. He suspects it may be mostly habit at this point. 

In the dark he smiles and it feels like the preamble to a scream. In and around his head the ghosts whisper and moan. 

Somewhere in the corner, in all corners, the scratch of a pencil across a page. Standing in the shadows and watching her write, and filled with the sudden and somewhat uncomfortable fantasy of sneaking into her cell once she was gone or asleep, peeking at what she had been writing. Not because he believed there was anything scandalous in it; just because it might have been interesting to see what someone else, someone like _her,_ deemed worth making words of and holding onto. 

He doesn't write. Ever. He suspects that some people question whether he can. 

He can. Not well, or he doesn't think so, but he can. 

What is she writing now? Watching him the way she always does, what is she recording? What of him is worth keeping?

By then he was spending most of his nights on his feet except for a few hours of fitful sleep snatched just as black bled into gray, walking the halls. The broken windows had barely been repaired, instead covered with plastic that snapped in the winter wind, but he would stop by the intact panes and stare out at the stretch of cracked pavement below and the empty planting beds, rectangular boxes full of dry, poisoned dirt which yielded a poor harvest and indicate no prospects of improvement, his fists clenched and teeth grinding. 

Angry at Rick but also just _angry_. 

He hadn't yet started to think so much about killing them. That comes with spring.

She burned her journal. He watched her do it. She burned everything she wanted to keep. There's nothing here he wants to keep but he doubts anything in this place is alive enough to burn.

~

**3**

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.  
There is no other version of this story.

~

He does see them, of course. All his friends, all his family, and they embrace him every time, tell him they miss him. Appear to mean it. They have a little Christmas celebration, the Hilltop and Alexandria and the Kingdom all together, and of course no Savior will be turned away—and doesn't he find anemic amusement in their names in the context of the holiday—and he wants fuck all to do with _that,_ but he does see them for the New Year, or what they approximate to be the day. The evening. There's a bonefire at Alexandria, and hot chocolate from powder and tinned crab and barbecued deer and bottles of actual champagne, and someone has a guitar and someone else rigs up a set of drums from plastic and scrap metal, and there's dancing, because of course there is. 

And someone sings. 

Songs he doesn't know. Songs he's forgotten. He realizes as he sits hunched on porch steps and listens that he no longer remembers any songs. Ask him how any of them go, any song ever in the history of the world, and he couldn't tell you. Some people forget in order to protect themselves but he doesn't imagine one might call this protection. 

What song did his ma sing when she did the dishes, when she was sober enough to do them? What song did his dad slur, staggering in from the bar at two in the morning and looking to deal some pain like a deck of razor-edged cards? What songs did he use to hear in roadhouses and honkytonks, in joints that ground bad heavy metal out of broken speakers, music like the Sanctuary’s own ghosts of industry? What songs did she sing? Good sweet God, _what songs did she sing?_  

_Why the fuck can't he remember?_

He's dropped his cigarette and he's yanking at his own hair so hard his eyes are watering. Dark, cold, mercilessly hard floor beneath him, no blanket and no pillow and no clothing, naked and helpless and hopeless, trying to eat himself from the inside out when they shoved dog food in his face. No light. No sleep. He threw himself against the walls, beat his head against the floor. He was weak and he prayed to die and he knew they wouldn't let him.

 _We’re on easy street_  
_And it feels so sweet_

His skull is full of wasps and fire. He gets up and stalks away into the night, toward the gates, and for a few moments he forgets that he has the bike and he nearly wanders off into the woods. Or maybe that wasn't an accident. Maybe he should have done it. The woods and the trees and the whisper of the wind, rustle of dry leaves, the crunch of frost under his boots. Better. Better out there, he is. He always has been.

His left hand hurts. He looks down at it. Blood crusts black in the hint of firelight. He gouged his scar open.

~ 

**4**

_It’s getting late, Little Moon. Finish the song._ It’s not that  
late. _You are my moon, Little Moon, and it’s late enough._  
_So climb down out of the tree._ Is it safe? _Safe enough._ Are  
you dead as well?

The night is cold, it is silver, it is a coin.

 _Not everyone is dead, Little Moon. But the big moon needs_  
 _the tree_. There is a ghost at the end of the song. _Yes,_  
_there is. And you see his hand and then you see the moon._  
Am I the ghost at the end of the song? _We are very close_  
now, Little Moon. Thank you for shining on me.

~

Later that new year, maybe a week or two or a month, still winter but in the midst of its decline, and he's sleeping maybe one or two hours a night. He didn't think that was possible. Surely people need more than that if they're going to _survive,_ let alone remain functional. But he doesn't sleep and yet he functions. Delegates work crews. Organizes the exchange of labor for food and medicine. Half listens to Eugene ramble on at top speed about shit that soars over his head and in the end waves him off with a grunted instruction to do whatever the fuck he wants.

He is not in charge. He tells himself that over and over. He's not. Not really. He's not the guy you put in charge. He helps, he does what he has to do, Rick wants him to be here and fuck Rick for that but it's what Rick wants and it's the only reason he's here and therefore he's not really in charge. Eugene is the one who actually handles what people do. Daryl sits in meetings and people seem to want to know his opinion on things, seem to run things by him and care what he has to say, but they can't possibly. Must be a show. His opinion isn't worth shit and there's no reason they should operate under the illusion that it is. How has he fooled them? Has he? He hasn't been trying. Why are any of them keeping up this charade? Why are any of them still _here?_  

He's beginning to have trouble retaining names. All their faces look like the faces in those roadhouses and honkytonks, the tired-eyed faces of the lost. Not the saved. Never them. 

He doesn't want to belong here. 

He is so, so afraid that this is precisely where he belongs.

Night, walking in the dead quiet. No sky over him but steel beams and sheet metal, no ground below him but the concrete. But there could be sky, he could reach it if he walked far enough, and he does, out into the yard. Cracks run through the pavement but nothing pushes up between them. He thinks back to late summer and autumn and he doesn't recall seeing anything growing even then.

This is not sustainable. 

He is not. 

There's no snow tonight. But there's a moon, waxing and heavy as a pregnant woman, and he stops between the planting beds and looks up at it, and he feels as though he's falling upward, tumbling into the black within which the moon hangs. Tumbling into their arms, perhaps, the crowd gathered behind him. Some names he doesn't remember but many names he does. Shane, sallow-skinned and hollow-eyed. Merle with his face stabbed into pulp. Andrea with a hole in her head. Hershel with his head only holding on by a thin strip of flesh. Tyreese with no arm where an arm should be. Sasha with her eyes opaque as milk. Denise with a bolt protruding from her eye and quivering gently with the lingering force of its journey through her skull. Abe with nothing left of his head at all. Carl. Carl in the center of it, his one remaining eye shadowed and unreadable. 

Two of them aren't there.

Very far away, behind the Sanctuary’s walls or out there among the skeletal trees or everywhere, someone is singing.

~

**5**

He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his  
hand. He was dead anyway, a ghost. I’m surprised I  
saw his hand at all. All this was prepared for me. All  
this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s  
future.

~

This is one place he's never come back to, as long as he's been here.

As far as he knows, no one comes down here much at all. He can't think why anyone would have much reason to. The era of capricious punishment is over, but more than that, he'd guess that most people here have either done a stint or know someone who has, and they avoid it as children avoid walking past a haunted house. 

But here he is now. In the thickest part of the night, standing in the dim hallway and staring at the door. Closed, innocuous. It might be any kind of door opening on any kind of room. Storage, custodial, mechanical. There are so many doors and so many rooms in this modern ziggurat of a structure and it might be any of them.

But he knows better.

Rick doesn't know. Rick doesn't know what happened to him. Rick must suspect, Rick can be infuriatingly dense but he's not _stupid,_ but Rick doesn't know the details. So it's not fair to be angry at him for the fact that Daryl is standing here now, for the fact that for months he's been living yards up and over from the site of his degradation. It's not fair to pile the blame at his feet. It's not fair to hate him. 

But he does. Christ, he does. He hates Rick so much in this moment that he thinks he might burst into flames. Fuck all these people here; if he was at Alexandria right now he could creep up the stairs to Rick’s room with his knife in his hand, make his way in feline silence through the bedroom door and to the bed, and in a single motion grip him by the hair and jerk his head back to expose his throat, and— 

And. 

He's not a good man. 

And because he's not a good man, he knows what he’ll see if he opens this door now. A man, scarcely a man, curled fetal in the dark, one hand flying up to shield his eyes from sudden scorching light. Naked and smeared with filth, matted hair hanging in his face, stink coming off him like a solid thing. Vomit and piss and shit; all they've given him is one small bucket that they refuse to empty and the dark is endless. He's disgusting and pitiful, this human creature. The grime on his face is streaked with tears. 

On the floor, facedown, is a polaroid. Standing behind the creature, standing over him, is a young man with his skull caved in. 

He has always been there. 

If Daryl opens the door, this is what he’ll see.

The yard. The moon. The fence is high, the barbed wire cruel black brambles in the colorless light. There's a long strip of gravel immediately past the fence but beyond that, not far…

The spreading arms of the trees. 

A little kid might think those arms were outstretched to clutch and catch and drag away. Now to him they look like an offered embrace. He could walk through the gates to greet them, move in among them and simply melt like the shadows he's been drifting through. Into the maples and the pines, the soft bed of needles and decaying leaves. The quiet watchfulness of animals. The death of winter is no death at all. Everything out there is alive.

Singing. A voice. Her. Very faint and very distant but unquestionable. Somewhere out there in the woods someone has made a fire and burned all their words and only a melody remains, and she's waiting there for him. 

He could. He's better out there.

In the cell, the ghost turns over and reaches up toward the young man with the ruined head, and lets out a sob that threatens to wrench his heart out through his throat. The young man wavers, flickers, and is gone.

He's not haunted. He can't be haunted.

In order to be haunted you have to be alive.

~ 

 _I stayed as long as I could,_ he said. _Now look at  
the moon._

 


End file.
